Postmortem: Insomniac Games' Ratchet & Clank

The
scene: Twenty developers lounging on a sun-drenched porch overlooking
Barham Boulevard in Los Angeles, drinks in hand, enjoying the warm
breeze and listening to traffic rumble by below. The occasion: Our
first post-Spyro brainstorming meeting.

It
was late spring 2000, and even though we were still in production
for Spyro: Year of the Dragon (our last Spyro), we
knew we had to start planning for our first PS2 project. Our problem
was twofold: we had decided not to develop any more Spyro
games, and we were deciding whether we wanted to stay with the platform-action
genre. It's a familiar scenario for game developers: the road is
wide open, but figuring out which direction to travel is excruciating.

We
had meeting after meeting trying to narrow down the choices -- and
with 20 people involved, things got tense and sometimes depressing.
I was driving hard to move us away from the platform genre because
Al Hastings, our vice president of technology, had very astutely
suggested that this was the perfect opportunity not only to expand
our abilities but to address other niches in the console market
currently overlooked by U.S. developers.

After
coming up with and discarding countless ideas, we settled on a concept
best described as a dark adventure. We wanted to try a game with
a bit more realism and immersion than our previous efforts. This
meant moving away from bright environments, cartoony characters,
and platform mechanics. This also meant creating a macro design
and story that were far deeper than those of the Spyro series.

The
high-flying duo,
Ratchet and Clank.

We
called the concept "I5" (for Insomniac game #5), and the main character
was a human girl with a staff. She would fight with the staff as
well as use it to activate magic with special katas -- martial arts
moves performed using directional input. There was a strong Mayan
influence to the overall look of the game, and the characters and
environments we planned were more realistic than anything we had
attempted since our first game, 1996's Disruptor.

We
pitched our game idea to SCEA and were fortunate to strike a deal
very early in preproduction. Once we had Sony's backing, our preproduction
team dove in and began working on PS2 technology, final macro design,
and all of the elements that would help us create our first playable.

Within
a couple of months, however, it was clear that things weren't going
well.

First,
we couldn't nail down the main character. She was too cartoony,
and then too mundane; the colors we chose ended up looking weird
on-screen, and we couldn't get the proportions right. In the past,
proportion had never been a problem, since we had always worked
with nonhuman characters. But we quickly realized that it's easier
to spot flaws in human characters than in nonhuman ones. Even though
our main character eventually looked acceptable, she still lacked
that je ne sais quoi which would make her stand out.

Then
there was the hardware. We were making the jump from PSX to PS2
in very little time, and Al Hastings was shouldering the entire
burden with some help from Mark Cerny, who had written the original
VU code used on the first-ever PS2 engine. Al and T.J. Bordelon,
tools programmer, were, at the time, trying desperately to get the
engine and tools to the point where the artists could use them to
build and prototype environments and characters. Looking back, I
can't believe they actually got everything to work, and work well,
in a matter of months. Still, the technology was not yet state-of-the-art,
and we all wondered how it would fare against the second generation
of PS2 titles.

Some
early concept sketches for Ratchet.

But
the worst part of the process was the entire team's ambivalence
about the project. No one was truly excited about the game or where
it was heading. We were making it work through sheer effort. My
job was to be the concept's champion, but maintaining a positive
demeanor was proving more and more difficult. Morale was at its
lowest in Insomniac's nine-year history.

We
eventually ground out a first playable, and while it wasn't bad,
it wasn't great either. And we wanted something great. Our Sony
producers, who were very polite about their reservations, confirmed
our feelings. Nonetheless, they had reservations. At one point Connie
Booth, our SCEA executive producer, suggested that we might want
to rethink the direction we were taking. While being very clear
that Sony would support us with whatever we decided, she pointed
out that not only would the PS2 adventure category be crowded upon
our planned release date, she also believed that we were no longer
playing to our team's strengths.

After
digesting her words, Al Hastings, Brian Hastings -- Insomniac's
vice president of programming -- and I (the three partners in the
company) did some soul searching and realized that Connie was right.
By pushing on, we could release a solid adventure game, one that
might even do well. But slogging through another year of developing
a game no one was excited about would kill the team.

So
on March 20, 2001, we stopped preproduction of I5 and started over.
We would be going back to our forte, action-platforming. This announcement
moved the team's mood lever from reverse to overdrive. Everyone
was energized and excited about the new prospects.

Within
two weeks of this decision, we developed Ratchet & Clank's
basic concept. In a matter of days, Dave Guertin, our lead character
designer, nailed the two main characters, and soon we were brainstorming
on the weapons and gadgets that players would be using.

Once
we got started, we never looked back. That isn't to say problems
didn't exist during the process, but it was the best and most enjoyable
production experience we've had at Insomniac.